~ the great escape from every day life

cranberries and white chocolate

… after a couple of weeks of heads down on job applications and studying and preparing for an interview (fingers crossed), I decided to take an afternoon off. The house was cold, but my heating bills quickly become horrendous so I try not to turn up the heating until the evening. I decided some baking would warm me, the apartment and give me something yummy to eat.

… cupboards examined, I had sugar! Clearly I needed to go shopping before I could make anything. Recipe chosen – cookies. I remember seeing mention of cranberry and white chocolate cookies somewhere recently. I love dried fruit, especially tart, sharp cranberries. I decided to improvise them using a basic cookie recipe and just adding the extras.

… home from the shop, sugar lined up with butter and flour, cranberries and a bar of chocolate – I couldn’t find chocolate chips on my quick excursion out in the country of chocolate. Oven switched on to preheat (the chef, the home and for cooking), equipment assembled, bowl on the scales to measure the first ingredients, and I am met with the message “Batt”? A couple of restarts and I realise the battery is flat, and no amount of switching on and off is going to provide enough energy for me to weigh out my 3 ingredients. With recipes I know I am usually happy to wing it, but when I am making something for the first time I tend to err on the side of precision.

… scales opened up and it is one of those really obscure shaped batteries that you don’t have lying around. I was going to have to go out to the shops again to get another battery. And once I did that it would be too late to make cookies as I was then going out for the evening.

… fast forward 24 hours, battery bought and installed, ingredients reassembled, equipment lined up, cookies made under the watchful eye of the dog, hoping something might fall on the floor. Into the oven and about 15 minutes later the golden cookies are removed from the oven, put out to cool, and then tested. Recipe approved!

Cranberry and white chocolate cookies
(apologies north Americans you are going to have to do the same gymnastics I always end up doing with your recipes to convert to non-metric – google works well!)

Preheat the oven to 170C
Cream the butter until soft
Add sugar and beat until light and fluffy
Add flour, chocolate and cranberries, mix gently until you have a dough
Take small (walnut sized) balls of dough and place directly on a baking tray (you don’t need to grease or line the tray), leave space for them to spread
Flatten cookies with a fork and bake for around 15 mins until golden brown and slightly firm on top
Taste, enjoy and share…